It’s no secret that India has a serious wealth distribution problem. Every year, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Now, a study by Oxfam has shown that India’s richest 1% has 4 times more wealth than the 953 million people who make up the bottom 70% of the country’s population.
It said that the total wealth of 63 Indian billionaires is more than the country’s annual Union Budget of Rs. 24,42,200 crore.
The study, titled ‘Time to Care’, found that the world’s 2153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60% of the planet’s population.
Oxfam India CEO Amitabh Behar said,
The gap between rich and poor can’t be resolved without deliberate inequality-busting policies, and too few governments are committed to these. Our broken economies are lining the pockets of billionaires and big business at the expense of ordinary men and women.
The Oxfam report also said women put in 3.26 billion hours of unpaid care work every day, contributing Rs 19 lakh crore a year to the Indian economy, which is 20 times the entire education budget of India in 2019 (Rs 93,000 crore).
In fact, the 22 richest men in the world have more wealth than all the women in Africa.
With all these shocking statistics coming to the fore, it’s understandable how many people believe billionaires should no longer exist, and an aggressive strategy of redistribution of wealth should be put in place on a global scale.